Thursday, December 13, 2007

Golden Globe Nominee

Presented by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, a relatively small group of about 85 people who cover show business for overseas media, the Golden Globes nevertheless exert considerable influence on awards season.

Basque composer Alberto Iglesias was selected Thursday among the nominees to the Golden Globes for the best Original Score for the original score of The kite runner.

Based on Khaled Hosseini's literary work and directed by Marc Forster, The kite runner tells the story of Amir, who returns to his homeland in Afghanistan after spending years in California to help his old friend Hassan, whose son is in trouble.

Fellow nominees of Iglesias were Michael Brook, Kaki King and Eddie Edder for Into the wild; Clint Eastwood for Grace is gone; Dario Marianelli for Atonement and Howard Shore for Eastern Promises.

The Golden Globes will be handed out Sunday, January 13. Presented by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, a relatively small group of about 85 people who cover show business for overseas media, the Golden Globes nevertheless exert considerable influence on awards season.

Iglesias was nominated for the 2006 Oscar awards for the original score for The Constant Gardener.

He was born in Donostia-San Sebastian (Gipuzkoa), where he learnt to play the piano and studied Harmony and Composition. Iglesias is one of the most significant composers in the Spanish State and has created several original scores for films by Julio Medem and Pedro Almodovar.

Hopefully this will translate into an Oscar nomination too.

And by the way, this movie has been in the middle of a storm over concerns for the safety of the young actors in it, check this out by Yahoo News:

"The Kite Runner" filmmakers strove for authenticity when they shot the adaptation of the best-selling novel, featuring a largely unknown cast of actors and having some dialogue in Dari (an Afghan language).

But they stumbled into an international controversy when the child actors said they feared being harmed by Afghans offended by a rape scene.

The film's theatrical debut was delayed six weeks (now Friday) to allow four boys to get out of Kabul, underscoring the political and financial risks filmmakers take when they make movies in conflict zones.

"The Kite Runner," based on the 2003 novel by Afghan-American writer Khaled Hosseini, is about two boys whose friendship in 1970s Kabul is torn by betrayal and ethnic rivalry. The film spans three decades — from before the Soviet invasion to the rise of the Taliban — and tells the plight of Afghan refugees as well as those who stayed in the country as it was ravaged by civil war.

But the turning point — when the main character Amir does nothing to stop the rape of his friend Hassan — took center stage after the film wrapped.

Ahmad Khan Mahmoodzada, who plays the role of young Hassan, told reporters that he feared he and his family could be ostracized or even attacked because of the scene. The boy, now 13, said he was reluctant to do the scene.

The film's producers, Bennett Walsh and Rebecca Yeldham, have said the child actors and their families told them they were comfortable with it.

Hosseini said the children were cast during a more stable time in Afghanistan, and he believed their concern arose as violence escalated in the last year.

"When the children were cast, if I thought that they might be victims of violence because of participating in this movie, we would have chosen children from outside this country," Hosseini said in a recent interview.

The author first returned to his native country in 2003, and felt safer then than he did two months ago, when he made a second trip as a goodwill envoy for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. "Now, especially in public places, you always have that unease," Hosseini said.